Preloading multiple movies for same panel

Question

Hello,
I'm new to JMF and have to achieve the following.
I have make an application that can play a collection of movies (50+) and play them in the same panel in arbitrary sequence. The movies need to play after each other as seamless as possible so they need to be preloaded as much as possible. The application can load as long as it wants but once it's playing movies need to start almost instantly.
So far ive tried working with one panel and making 50 MediaPlayer objects attached to the one panel and removing content of panel after each one is added.
In my attempts i tried:
prefetching each after loading;
realizing them after loading
realizing them before i start playing
but i because i still havent figured out the right way to do this ive had very messy results. ( Not realized exceptions, sound playing but no visuals, several movies are playing at the same time, .. movies wont start after they have been stopped etc....)
Can someone who is more familiar with JMF please put me back on track? I fear that my approach isnt the good one but i have no idea how to attempt this.
Thanks in advance,
Hendrik

Answer 1

Thing is, it is decided only at runtime which movie will
play after the current one That is what I was assuming, yes.
One form of such a thing might be the user
points to a directory, and the app. plays the
animations it finds, in random order.
For this, the app. could keep a list of files or
URL's of potential files to play next, selecting
the 'very next' at the exact moment the next file
is required or called for.
...so I would have to preload them all. I do not see why. In my way of imagining
the scenario, the app. might be loading the
'next' clip as it is playing the current one.
All it would need to store 'all of' is the File
(or URL, or String that represent file or
URL) objects that are animations.
If it turns out the clips are so short in duration
that it takes longer to load them than play them,
it might pay to have a number of threads loading
the next clips (plural). So fire up a number of
'load next vid.' threads, and it should all work
just fine.
...Wouldnt it be possible to preload 50 clips
using MediaPlayer.prefetch() when loading? Yes. No. Maybe. Depends..
How long is a piece of string?
(To put that another way)
I have animations of 80-120 Meg. in size
that run for around 20-40 seconds each
(800x600 at 15-20FPS from high res.
JPEG's - no audio). Running in a standard
memory JRE, I can expect to see around
25-30 of them in sequence before the
multi-file player I mentioned earlier, hits
OutOfMemoryErrors. So, ..
No.
Playing 'plain old' MOV's produced by a
Kodak camera recording a 320x240 format
at 15 FPS with 22KHz sound, I can play over
an hour of video before OOME's.
Yes.
Of course, increase the memory assigned to
the app., and you can expect to delay the OOME
(unless reusing players, or finding a way to
effectively dispose of them - in which case you
can increase the number that can be
preloaded).
Maybe..